Sunday, August 21, 2011

Colourbration Day Two

The things you do on tour…

Eat way too much junk food, stay in odd places, drink too much red wine, find yourself watching an old episode of thunderbirds at some unearthly hour of the morning and, best of all, take embarrassing photos of leading alpaca breeders for future blackmail purposes…

But enough of that, back to the show.

A good day yesterday, a first and a fourth with our first two animals.

First up today was James with Illustrious, a light fawn junior that I’m really excited about

Colourbration 2011, Illustrious

A tough class with some good competition and….. Drum Roll…. A first! A great result and she’s probably booked herself a ticket to the nationals in October.

Next, a bit of light relief. I blogged earlier in the year about our first appaloosa. A complete surprise to us all when he arrived from a line that is solid on both sides.

Well, spotties are a growing thing – they’re getting more and more popular and this little boy has got a very fine and well defined fleece, so, why not…

Colourbration 2011 Appaloosa

Another first! This is getting silly.

Interesting though that the line-up for the 'fancy' championship, which, of course, was won by Ambersun Jag, were all spotties…

Expect another blog about him when it comes to shearing time – I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s there when his fleece comes off.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Colourbration – Day One, Part Two

First success!

OK, it’s a second place, but it’s a second place to the animal that went on to take the championship, so I’ll happily bank that.

SONY DSC

Cassia is another one from our suri experiment, an experiment that is, so far, going very well. Colin, our suri sire, is throwing some quite outstanding offspring. We nearly pulled her from the show at the last minute – she was that muddy and messy, certainly far from show condition. But the girl did good.

Colourbration – Day One

SONY DSC

For us, Victorian Colourbration is, second only to the National Show, one of the year’s most important events. It has almost become the colour breeders’ national.

Sadly, we’ve only brought a small, wet and muddy team this year but hopefully they won’t disgrace us too much and the judges will be able to make allowances for the paddock conditions.

Congratulations to the organisers, a well laid out shed, good facilities and the bacon sandwich to start the day was spot-on (very important at any show!)

More later